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Today’s topic starts with a story.
It’s a very specific story about wealth.
We’ve actually lived inside this particular tale for a very long time, especially if you’re from the U.S. like me.
What’s the story?
The Myth Of The Rugged Individualist
Well, it’s the tale of the Rugged Individualist. The “self-made” success. That ambitious young person who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps… who, against all odds, earned their place in the world through grit, intelligence, and hard frickin’ work.
You know this story, right?
It’s a powerful tale. And for a long time, it worked well enough that we didn’t really question it. But this story has a BIG problem…
It was never really true.
And we need to talk about it now, because I am pretty sure A.I. is going to break this story apart entirely. Not because technology is the villain, but because A.I. makes something we’ve been able to ignore for generations impossible to ignore now.
What is that thing? The ecosystem.
I know the word “ecosystem” might conjure up visions of rainforests or coral reefs and cycles of life in the biological world. And all that’s correct, but there are other ecosystems all around us, too.
Every city is an ecosystem.
Every market is an ecosystem.
Every language is an ecosystem.
A city doesn’t function without roads, water systems, power grids, and collective agreements to maintain them.
As we discussed a couple weeks ago, markets don’t function without the support of a state to enforce regulations and laws.
A language doesn’t exist without thousands of people shaping it together over generations.
Nothing exists in isolation. Everything depends on conditions created by what came before and what surrounds it now.
Monetary wealth works the same way. It doesn’t emerge solely from individuals. But if you were to believe the story of the Rugged Individualist, it would have you believe a wealth ecosystem just… doesn’t exist. That it was only through their hard work and their indomitable spirit that they became “a success.”
Even when we kinda knew, deep down, that this could’t be the whole picture, the story held together emotionally. It felt useful. And it WAS inspirational. I mean, I want to be the guy who succeeds when nobody else could!
But this story also did things that were not so constructive.
First, it justified inequality without requiring cruelty. We talked about this in the Economics episode a couple weeks ago. If you “earned” what you have, then inequality isn’t injustice — it’s just the natural result of different people making different choices.
Second, this story moralized wealth, meaning: if success comes from “merit,” then being rich means you must be GOOD. And we should probably put you on a magazine cover!
Most tragically though, this story erased its own ecosystem. This was, I think, the biggest deception of all, because nothing grows outside an ecosystem.
No achievement exists in isolation. Every success rests on support networks, community scaffolding, public education, city infrastructure, institutional stability — and the sheer luck of being born in the right place, in the “right” body, in the right country, in the right century.
The Rugged Individualist myth survived by editing all of that out. It let us ignore the ecosystem that makes success possible.
But I think A.I. is going to kill this story for good.
A.I. Should Activate Our Inheritance
Why?
Because A.I. doesn’t just help us write things and automate tasks. It illuminates our collective inheritance.
What do I mean by that?
Well, modern A.I. systems are built on the foundation of publicly funded research, open scientific knowledge, shared language and culture, data generated by billions of ordinary human lives, and infrastructure that’s been paid for collectively over generations.
That’s just the facts, y’all.
And yet, we’re still pretending the value these systems create somehow belong to whoever monetizes this best…?
That mismatch creates a fracture a lot of us are feeling.
It’s why phrases like “tax the machines” or “redistribute the efficiency gains” keep showing up in the comments of my Who Buys Your Stuff, Robots? episode. Those comments aren’t precise policy arguments, but they are quite truthful in the way they’re responding to this moral dissonance we feel.
We can feel that something here with A.I. is… off. We see that value is being generated from something collective but captured as if it were private. I haven’t heard this problem articulated quite like this, but I think our intuition is very right.
I think what we’re feeling is a sense of: “Hold up techbros… that value you’re extracting from didn’t come from you efforts alone.” To call back to my favorite Jurassic Park scene from last week: our LLM scientists stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as they could, then packaged it and sold it.
So I think it’s time we stand up and say: “Sorry techbros… what you’re selling does not belong to you.”
OK, Let’s Talk About UBI Now
Once I start talking about sharing monetary gains three letters immediately enter the dialogue:
UBI. Universal Basic Income.
I’m not sure when you first heard of this idea, but I had no idea how old this actually is, and how many different people have supported it over the years!
Thomas Paine, the Common Sense guy from American Revolution days, proposed it in 1797. He called it a “national fund” — compensation for the loss of common land that enclosure had stolen from ordinary people.
Martin Luther King Jr. championed this in the 1960s as “the solution to poverty.”
Richard Nixon — a Republican president remember — nearly got this passed into law as “negative income tax” for households with working parents in 1970 and then again in 1971. It cleared the House twice with bipartisan support. It died in the Senate, but not because people thought it was radical — because they thought the payments were, get this: too low.
In recent years, UBI experiments have run in Kenya, Finland, California, and dozens of other places.
Andrew Yang brought it into the 2020 presidential race and called it the Freedom Dividend.
Sam Altman of ChatGPT has been helping to fund UBI research for a number of years. That organization’s called OpenResearch and has a really beautiful and informative website that’s worth checking out.
Just last week, a UK government minister publicly said they’re weighing universal basic income to ‘soft-land’ industries being wiped out by A.I.
So, UBI = not a fringe idea. Not even a new idea. It’s a design response to a system problem that keeps recurring: what do we do when our economy generates wealth faster than it generates jobs?
You’ve maybe heard about “mixed results” from UBI experiments. Totally fair. I’m not saying UBI is the perfect answer to the A.I. question; I actually think there’s a better solution we’ll talk about in a moment. But I did want to mention that the “mixed results” we’ve seen from UBI I think mostly come from not testing it as consistently and broadly as we would actually need UBI to be. Most experiments thus far have been designed to test whether poor people waste money (they don’t), whether free cash kills work ethic (it doesn’t), and whether unconditional monetary support improves wellbeing (it does).
But all that said, there’s a related but slightly different angle on this topic that solves our A.I. conundrum even better.
A Shared Wealth Fund.
I’m not pointing us in this direction because there’s anything wrong with UBI, per se, but because new language helps us conceive of new possibilities. AND this phrase more accurately describes what we actually need.
So, what’s a Shared Wealth Fund?
You might be surprised to know we actually have one of these already functioning right here in the U.S., and in one of our right-leaning states no less! Alaska has had something called the Alaska Permanent Fund that’s been paying residents since 1982. Every Alaskan gets an annual paycheck from oil revenues called the Permanent Fund Dividend, and it’s wildly popular.
I want us to build a Shared Wealth Fund on the back of A.I. technology. This would be transformational.
Why?
First, because A.I. wealth is far more profound than oil wealth. It scales infinitely. Information isn’t contained by planetary boundaries in the same way.
Second, a Shared Wealth Fund is the perfect solution to help stabilize The Loop That Holds Up The World because A.I. tech is so clearly derived from our collective contributions over the past few generations.
An A.I.-based Shared Wealth Fund would do a bunch of really powerful things:
- Decouple survival from employment — we need to get ahead of this before mass unemployment forces our hand.
- Distribute returns from collective systems — this A.I. thing we all helped build would pay something back to those of us who made it possible.
- Create pre-distribution instead of re-distribution — we design these things upfront, which is easier and better than trying to claw money back.
- Remove desperation as an organizing force over the coming decade — we don’t need to shove ourselves into another Great Depression! With a little thought and planning, we could prevent that outcome.
Shared Wealth Funds aren’t charity, they’re dividends from systems we all already paid into. They’re an acknowledgement of the ecosystem, a recognition that the value being generated was never “individual” in the first place.
Also, we already have successful models for Shared Wealth Funds all over the world.
Norway has had a sovereign wealth fund since 1990, built on oil revenues. It’s now worth nearly $2 trillion — the largest in the world. Every Norwegian citizen is a beneficiary. They use the fund to invest globally, and the returns help fund pensions, healthcare, and education.
Singapore runs multiple sovereign wealth funds that manage national savings and also invest for long-term returns. These funds help stabilize their economy and benefit Singaporeans collectively.
Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar — all Gulf states with similar models.
When collective resources generate massive value, these funds are used to ensure wealth gets distributed collectively and not just funneled back into private pockets.
And of course, we’ve got one right here in the U.S.
These aren’t unproven experiments. They’re functioning systems, working at scale, across wildly different political contexts.
If we can do this with oil, why not with A.I.?
Perhaps most importantly, a Shared Wealth Fund built on A.I. would finally kill the Rugged Individualist story for good. Because, and I hope you agree, A.I. makes the ecosystem around wealth impossible to ignore.
We can tell ourselves we “earned” our wealth when it came from our labor, our business, our deals… maybe.
But it’s not fair for people to tell themselves they “earned” returns from things that were so clearly built on publicly funded research, open-source tools, collective knowledge, data from billions of people, and infrastructure created through generations of shared investment. That’s crazy!
When we see how clearly A.I. breaks the Rugged Individualist myth, I think “shared dividends” stop sounding strange and just start sounding like good, basic accounting.
Here’s why the timing on this matters so much: right now, A.I. wealth is still forming. The ownership structures are being established. We’re in a moment where decisions about who participates in the returns are still up for grabs.
It’s a little like building a house and putting in plumbing. From what I hear, it’s highly preferable to install the plumbing while the house is being built. Putting in plumbing later…a lot harder!
This is not yet a disaster. But it’s going to get MUCH harder if we wait.
The “Before” Moment
Right now we’re in a “before” moment. We’ve talked about this: most systems only change once pain is obvious and widespread. We regulate after crashes. We reform after collapse. We reinforce structures after they fail.
But what if we could do something different this time??
A.I. is giving us something we don’t always get with system failures: clear advance warning.
We can already see productivity decoupling from labor. We can already see ownership concentrating faster than wages are increasing. We can already see demand that’s being propped up by debt instead of income. We can see the fault lines forming.
This is the “before” moment. Now is the time to act.
An A.I.-based Shared Wealth Fund is a proactive move. It doesn’t wait for mass unemployment. It doesn’t require people to fail first. It doesn’t treat humans as collateral damage of progress. It simply acknowledges reality early, while we still have room to design.
My friends, we need our leaders to be talking about this now.
What’s interesting is that serious academics are landing in this same place. Just a few days ago, Stanford University published an article about this exact topic, noting that if U.S. companies had deposited a small slice of their founding shares into a public wealth fund a few decades ago — back when those shares were worth nothing — the U.S. would already be paying every citizen a meaningful dividend. No taxes. No clawbacks. Just good pre-distribution design.
This tells us two very important things:
- This idea isn’t radical, and
- It needs to happen now.
The Optimistic Rebellion
At this point, you might be thinking, “Okay… but what can I do about this?”
Great question. That means it’s time for our Optimistic Rebellion!
If you’re new, we do this every week. Some weeks we work on our mindset. Sometimes we take on noticing practices or micro-behavior experiments. This week’s Optimistic Rebellion is all about taking action.
I am going to ask you to DO SOMETHING.
What exactly you do, of course, is up to you, but here’s 3 options:
The first action you could take is to share this idea with someone… especially someone influential. I’m not assuming we all know these people, but I’m betting some of us in this community do! If you happen to know anyone in a societal leadership role — an elected official, a public figure, an Instagram Influencer! — send them this episode. We just need more people in positions of influence to start talking seriously about this. If we can get this idea into the dialogue, I think it might catch on.
The second action you could take is to start adopting new language for yourself. Start guiding UBI conversations toward the idea of a Shared Wealth Fund because new language helps people think differently. Tell people about a pre-distribution design when they bring up taxes (which are re-distribution) as the only solution. Talk about how it’s our collective participation that made A.I. technology possible. Start discussing how we should all have ownership in this because we all helped build it.
The third action you could take is to try a new experiment with me! There are so many possible things we could do to help this idea spread, and I think this idea is really important, AND I didn’t want to spend ten minutes listing all of the ideas, so I decided to create something new: a Shared Wealth Fund Field Guide.
It’s a beautiful little PDF booklet you can download for free, and it has 6 more ideas for practical actions to do. It’s also a great thing to spread around.
If y’all like these Field Guides btw, I can make them for future Optimistic Rebellions! LMK what you think of it in the comments. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD
A.I. is throwing us some major warning signals, my friends. We’ve been talking about them on this show. We don’t need to panic, but we do need to act. Because once this becomes a crisis, the choices available to us get harsher and narrower.
Right now, we still have space.
And remember: space is the language of the rebellion.
So let’s use the space we have now to help make something better happen for all of us.
Well, maybe not for the billionaires, but the rest of us. Believe me, those “Rugged Individuals” will be just fine. 😉
